Are C.D.s outdated?

i kinda get annoyed if i dont have a physical copy of something on CD.
I just feel much better about myself having a decent CD collection.

Its a work in progress

The abondonment of media has far reaching implications.

Digital means the end of the mating ritual of flipping through a persons music collection. I mean how are you supposed to decide if someone is sponge worthy? An RSS playlist feed to their cell phone?

Then there's the whole matter of the 'mix tape'.

hell no, they're not outdated.

mp3s are vaporous. you "have" them, but they're vulnerable to system crashes and accidental erasures, and frankly the sound isn't nearly as good. you don't notice so much on loud guitar rock music, but believe me, anything that has more of a dynamic range loses out.

plus, i'm just old-fashioned and materialistic enough to want to have physical objects.

People will always want a physical item in their hands. Computer games were supposed to go completely digital years ago, but most people wanted no part of it. They don't want the hassle of a risky download, an erasure, or anything in between.

If people just want disposable pop music, it's one thing. But people who treasure specific albums will always want the disc/vinyl/tape/whatever.

Ah, but Apple keeps track of all of the mp3s I've bought from them. If my hard drive gets formatted by a malicious ex-girlfriend, I can just sign into iTunes and say "Check for purchased music" and it'll download all of the music I ever bought that is no longer on the drive. Now, on the other hand, if that samme malicious ex-girlfriend sells my entire CD collection to subsidize a shopping spree, Blu Cantrell style, I can't go to the record store and say "Check for purchased music" and expect them to hand me copies of all of that music.

All of these technologies have their strengths and weaknesses.

Actually I put it up on top of the DVD player sort of like a now showing thing so I don't have to keep answering "What are you watching?" as people wander in and out of the room.

I'm a full album kinda person, I like the CD format, they're easy enough to take care of as long as you put the damn things back in the case instead of leaving them in stacks to use as ashtrays. Also I'm in the camp of people who just don't care enough about the sound quality to go to anything higher.

I still remember a friend trying to convince me that music sounds better when you take a 128 mp3 and resample it to a higher bitrate. You're just getting a more accurate version of the errors involved in the lower sample rate.

I disagree about people "always" wanting physical media. I rarely touch my CDs. They're all ripped to a server. Same with many of my friends' CD collections. I love the arcade fire's album "funeral" to death, and I don't have the physical media and probably never will.

And as for software, Macromedia and Adobe have been offering downloadable purchase software for years now. I've taken them up on the offer a few times, as have my cohorts. Sure, we back up the program for convenience, but what's really important is that serial number. The physical media is not. "Risky downloads" and "erasures" just aren't an issue anymore, as you can freely download it from theri site at any time.

Plenty of games are also internet download based. Small publishers have embraced this in a big way and larger companies are moving toward it. Look at Valve's Steam system. http://www.reflexive.net/ has some great games, and I don't think they even offer physical media.

Physical media like CDs are on their way out, I tell ya.

Some people still keep and embrace their vinyl collections. I will do so with my CDs. I have too much time and money invested in them to give them up. I love my "media shelf." To me, it is an extention of my tastes and personality and really ties the room together.

Mp3s are fine. I use them when I'm dicking around on my computer, putting together mix cds or burning discs. But when I'm listening to music around the house, it is from my stereo and my CDs.

Are you positive on the simplicity this? I had lost some songs and had to e-mail Apple and in return I received back a "we don't do this normally but will this time..." e-mail. I'm tempted to delete a song to see if I can re-download it without hassle.

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My biggest worry is file-format compatibility. Is every player in the future going to be able to handle mp3, AAC, whatever? What if I decide to get a player that doesn't support AAC - should I then re-encode my songs to not only break the DRM but to force it into a new format at the loss of more sound quality? On the other side, I still see record players for sale. I'm sure CD-players will be available for a long time. Buy once and encode as you need. The only time I buy on iTMS is for the one-off single.

I agree that CDs are just too damn expensive though.


[Edited on Aug 06, 2005 by myrr_allinc]

[Edited on Aug 06, 2005 by myrr_allinc]

I just got sattelite radio, i dont worry about cds anymore.

I hate digital music anymore. Downloading music to me just feels cheap. Cheap like waking up next to your, well you get the picture. I love buying CDs and I love increasing my collection constantly. Hell I'll even break down and buy a few vinyls now and again.

Anyone who says buying CDs is an outdated method really should take a look at want their doing. It degrates the honesty, the power, the emotion one album contains.

When I was 20 I probably thought my music collection was totally bomb, too! However, I'm willing to bet that in a few short years you'll be trimming quite a bit of fat off it, at the local record store or on ebay. With age comes a maturation in taste.....you'll have a more discerning ear; and you won't believe some of the shit you used to LOVE.

Well, after taking a peek at your fave band list I will submit this: Beatles, Led Zep, Sex Pistols & Blondie are the only ones I maintain whole albums of material. The rest of your faves, I have a couple songs from most of them. The few songs I have by Blink-182, I really enjoy; but i don't need to own a whole album of their stuff. I tried real hard to like The Strokes, esp. with all the hype they got; however Barely Legal & You Talk Way Too Much are the only songs that got me off. So, there ya go. A couple of examples of bands I listen to, but don't need whole albums from. I have a huge collection, and probably hundreds of bands that I have whole albums by; but thousands more that only require a few songs. When I was buying vinyl, I always valued my singles collection way more, as well.

Computers were supposed to have turned us into a "paperless society" as well. Judging from the piles of pulp-product on my desk things didn't quite turn out as planned....
In other words, don't count out "physical media" juuuussstttt yet.

I buy all my music on itunes now. I have hardly any cds. if I ever get them, i rip them and toss em in a drawer, never to be used again.

The idea of the paperless office was based on the incorrect assumptions that either people could restrict their written communications to computers or that computers could be ubiquitous enough to be able to place information anywhere it might be needed, along with the side-assumptions that either of these practices would be as cost effective, useable, and versatile as paper. This isn't the case and won't be for some time, so that's just not a realistic goal at the moment.

CDs are a different matter, though. If you look at paper and CDs as transmission media rather than as storage and compare in that context, you'll see that CDs are already more expensive than computer bandwidth, while paper is still cheap enough for very low bandwidth applications. (Hence, we use business cards. We don't use CD business cards.)

And with the advent of fast, cheap decoders for compression algorithms like MP3 or AAC, high quality audio has become an even lower bandwidth application than when CDs were invented. Once really fat network bandwidth is available, it'll be even lower in comparison. It just won't be profitable to manufacture, store and transport physical media for music. Also, once people get used to having their music entire music collection easily accessible, the usability difference will drive people further away from physical media. I know it already has for me. And people I know with Ipods are the same way.

In essence the computer/paper internet/CD analogy is flipped. The reasons why paper survives amid computers (cost, usability, versatility) are the same reasons the internet is going to "kill" CDs.

The CD will probably stay around in a niche capacity, like cassettes and vinyl. DVDs will probably replace them for data for a short time, but those too will go away too as bandwidth opens up.

I'm a luddite, I still love CD's.